Brewing Bad Ch. 87-88

Ch. 87 - What the Actual Fuck

The silence of the gnome's words settled over them for several seconds before Lucas finally spoke. “I didn’t sign up to kill a fucking dragon.”

“Nor will you have to,” Heisenburgle said. “Probably. If we can—”

“Probably? Probably?” Lucas said, suddenly on his feet. “I’m a fucking alchemist… a god damned drug dealer. This isn’t a rival gang or the city guard… it’s a fucking dragon.”

Lucas had never personally seen a dragon, nor did he want to. He’d heard stories, though, and the fact that a dwarf had been telling him about them didn’t make them any less of a fairy tale to him. 

“Big as castles,” Kar’gandin had told him. “Or warehouses, at least, if they’re young. They could eat a whole army without much trouble, and they have, too. More often than you’d think.”

At the time, Lucas thought that the dwarf had to be shitting him, but now that his new client was a dragon, well, that put it all into a little more perspective. 

“Would you let me finish?” the gnome asked peevishly. He was always annoyed when he was interrupted, but he’d obviously had some grand speech in mind that Lucas had stepped on. “If your ‘Blue’ is as simple as you say to synthesize, then it should be no mean feat to simply enhance it with another ingredient or two and get it to the proper potency or somewhat less than benevolent guardian requires.”

“You’re forgetting that every new ingredient we add could have negative interactions with every other ingredient that’s already there,” Lucas sighed. “That shit is a nightmare.”

“I’m forgetting nothing of the sort,” Heisenburgle shot back. “You are using ditch weeds and garbage to make poison and then converting that poison into a narcotic. It will be a simple enough formulation to simply mix other, stronger poisons together and achieve stronger results. And if not… well, perhaps we can mix up some draconic poison instead and—”

“You want to give a dragon a hot shot?” Lucas laughed. “There is no way that ends well.”

The two bickered about the thing for hours before they finally went their separate ways. The gnome swore him to secrecy about the whole thing, but Lucas wasn’t a moron. The less people who knew anything about the dragon, the better. He had zero intention of sending anything back home about that. There was no way he was getting any of them involved in any of this madness. 

In fact, in the aftermath of that conversation was, the first time that Lucas considered trying to escape. He didn’t think it would be hard. A quick jaunt through the gates while invisible, and he’d be free. From there, he could go back to Parin Manor, and they could load up a couple of wagons with gold and supplies. After that, they could head out and start over somewhere far from here. It didn't even have to involve Blue next time. He could just make healing potions and lead a nice, normal life somewhere quiet and peaceful.

He would have done it, too, if the images of Lordanin burned to the ground hadn’t filled his mind as he considered the problem. If the Prince ran out of gold to pay the monster, then it would likely burn down the town in retribution. If they tried to kill it before that happened and failed, then it would definitely raze the town to the ground.

So Blue’s the only way out, huh? He thought to himself as he stared up at the ceiling that was slowly being revealed by dawn’s light. That was almost enough to make him laugh. The idea that drugs were the solution to any problem was always the first sign that you’d fucked up somewhere along the way.  

After lying around for hours trying to decide what the right move was, the sleep that eventually took him was fitful and unsatisfying. The day that followed was no better, either, though. As much as he tried to tell himself to read when he woke up sometime in the afternoon, the dull words swam on the page whenever he tried. He simply couldn’t absorb the material. It was impenetrable. He could read the same page a dozen times without remembering any of them. 

Eventually, for lack of anything better to do, he went outside and walked around in the cold. In this place, one never really needed to go outside, so it was easy to forget how cold it was getting, but Lucas embraced the chill, and he strolled around the edge of the compound, receiving strange looks from the guards until he started to shiver as the short day came to an end. 

That was when he finally went back inside and went upstairs to get started on this shit. He was in no mood to wait for the gnome today. If he didn’t work on something productive, he’d go crazy. “It doesn’t matter who it’s for,” he told himself as he gathered books and ingredients in the tower library. “We’ve got a job to do, and the sooner we do it, the sooner I can go home and pretend there’s not a flaming doom hanging above us all.”

That was easier said than done, of course, but at least up here, now that his hands were busy, he could concentrate to some degree. Lucas quickly got all of the ingredients that he needed and then proceeded to look them up in Heisenburgle’s reference books, making notes about each of their elemental alignments. He normally didn’t give a shit about those things, but if they had to make a stronger blue, then maybe there was a pattern there.

Maybe the complications are less likely when they’re all the same element or some shit, he told himself. Such a pattern was not immediately apparent, though. 

Blue esper willow - Strong water, weak fire.

Goblin bile - Unknown

Sour dwarf berries - Weak fire

Witch grass blossoms - Strong Earth, weak water  

Wizened gnome caps - Weak earth.

The results were all over the map. Worse, since the books with all of this information offered no way to test unknown compounds, he had no way to see what the goblin bile would be since alchemists didn’t consider it a real reagent. 

Lucas gave Heisenburgle an especially hard time about that when he saw them a few hours later. “Of course, there are ways to test the elemental nature of components, but you just weren’t looking at the right book!” the gnome answered, moving over to the bookshelf and picking out an entirely separate book. “We wouldn’t need to do this, though, if you would just stick to actual reagents that—”

“Hey, it's worked pretty well so far, and my first master, well, he was a waste not want not sort of guy, you know?” Lucas shot back as he took the offered book and started looking for the answer himself. 

“So this master was the one to teach you this recipe?” the gnome asked, suddenly curious. “Maybe we should hear a bit more about him. Where did he study? What books has he written?”

Lucas smirked at that but avoided actually laughing out loud. Mister Markesh was hardly the writing type and had scarcely done more than scrawl a few notes on the pages of his ledger about the best combinations of herbs he found. 

Lucas didn’t say that, though. Instead, he said, “The man was self-taught, and he didn’t give me the recipe per se… it’s more like something I invited with some of his leftovers.” Heisenburgle scowled at that. 

Invented was a bit too strong of a word, honestly. Combining the leftovers from his master’s benders out of curiosity wasn’t invention. It was an accident. It just happened to have been a very profitable one. If he’d been a little less curious as a person, then he might very well have ended up shilling the same slop that the Blind had been selling from out of their chop shop to make ends meet.  

“My master… well, you wouldn’t have liked him,” Lucas continued. “He mostly just used what was at hand, like I did. Figured out how to make old elven remedies stronger. Shit like that, you know.”

“Bah, elves!” Heisenburgle said, throwing up his hands as he started to retrieve other ingredients from the shelves. “They live a thousand years, and yet, in that time, they still stick to herbal remedies and magic. What is the point of a long life if it is not spent in pursuit of advancing the alchemical arts?”

“I mean, dwarves live a long time too, don’t they?” Lucas asked, smirking at the idea that everything had to come down to alchemy for it to be important. “I don’t think they do much in the way of alchemy.”

“The things they do with alcohol are surprisingly close, honestly,” the gnome answered as he returned with an arm full of jars. “But there have been a few notable dwarven alchemists… I can think of Bar’gora the—”

“My reading list is already full,” Lucas said glumly. “I don’t need any more suggestions, and as much as I like cooking, even I think there’s more to life than this.”

“Oh? Like what?” Heisenburgle asked. “I’m one hundred and forty-two years old, and for at least the last century, Alchemy has been my sole passion, and I find that I’m not missing out on anything at all.”

Lucas immediately thought of Danaria when Heisenburgle asked his question, but he said nothing. Instead, he felt his cheeks flush slightly at the realization that she was the first thing to come to mind and turned to focus on the ingredients that the gnome had brought him. 

They were as toxic as anything he’d ever seen. Goblin bile was a 9 on the poison scale, but every one of these was worse. He didn’t even think the numbers went that high until now. 

Wyvern Venom: Poison 16, agility 2, strength -3. Weakly air-aligned.

Vampire Blood (elder): Poison 10, endurance 8. Strongly undeath aligned. Potions crafted with this ingredient have a small chance of causing vampirism. 

Gelatinous Slime (green): Poison 12, speed 1, strength -6. Toxic.

Hydra Saliva (preserved): Poison 14, endurance -6. Highly acidic to metal and organic containers. 

It wasn’t hard to see his plan, but Lucas let him explain it anyway so as not to give away the little descriptions he was reading. “You might not be familiar with all of these,” Heisenburgle began, self importantly, “But each of these four ingredients represents some of the most toxic substances we have at our disposal. So, we will mix a new batch of your Blue, then we'll add one of these to each, and observe its effects on our testers. We might be able to resolve this problem by the end of the day.”

Lucas thought that was incredibly optimistic, but he wasn’t above playing with some new toys. It's not like it was his money that was going to waste. 

This time, as Lucas went through the steps of distilling Blue as a first step, Heisenburgle watched closely and asked many questions. How hot do you allow this one to get? What color should it be before you filter out the initial reagent? How long should this distillation take? 

They were good questions, and Lucas did his best to answer him, but he couldn’t give him the real answer. Oh, I take this out when the number gets to 4, and this one gets boiled until its poison is only 2, which was the real answer, but he couldn’t tell that to anyone. Instead, he just explained what he saw when the time was right, and the gnome made careful notes. 

This batch of Blue came out at euphoria 9, just like the last one, which pleased him, but those numbers quickly changed. They parceled out some of the drug into 4 different vials, and then after Heisenburgle insisted that they not run any of those through an alcohol wash to compare apples to apples, he added a drop to each. The results were, well... They were worse than Lucas had expected. 

The Blue with the hydra saliva began to froth and smoke before turning an ugly gray color, the green slime started to bubble and overflow, spilling toxic drugs across the workbench, and the wyvern venom turned black and started to coagulate. Only the vampire blood mixed with it to any degree, and the result was something he wasn’t sure he’d want to drink, even if he was an addict. It wasn’t even blue anymore. Instead, it was a deep, malevolent purple, and the 

Brew of Mana Intoxication (corrupted) (3 doses): Euphoria 6, poison 4, endurance 2, intelligence -1, mana regeneration decreased by 125% for 1 hour. 

Lucas wasn’t sure what corrupted meant exactly in this context, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to. “See, I told you this wasn’t going to work,” Lucas said finally. “I was thinking that maybe we could—”

“Didn’t work? Nonsense,” Heisenburgle interrupted as he grabbed the purple potion. “One in four are fine odds when trialing new recipes. This thing might just be the answer we need right here.”

Lucas wasn’t sure anyone should be taking that, and he said as much as they cleaned up the mess, but Heisenburgle knew better. So, once the lab was as it should be and the toxic compounds were put back away, he followed the gnome downstairs so they could see the results of their experiment on an unwitting subject.

Ch. 88 - Over and Over

The prisoner took the potion greedily enough and drank the does he was given deeply. He seemed to enjoy the high, too and was out in seconds with a faint smile on his lips. It wasn’t until the following day that Lucas found out the man died. 

“Dead?” he asked when Hisenburgle revealed the news in a tone that was so bland he might have been talking about the weather. “How?”

“He went berserk, according to the guards,” the gnome answered with a shrug, “Tried to kill the other two men in his cell and then beat himself bloody against the bars until men with swords put him down.”

“Tried to kill his cellmates, or tried to eat them?” Lucas asked, remembering the side effect he’d seen on the vampire blood. “Because it sounds like—”

“I know what it sounds like, and that’s a well-known side effect of that ingredient, which is why it’s used so rarely in reputable potions, but it had to be tried,” Heisenburgle answered, cutting Lucas off. “Suffice to say, the corpse was not reactive to sunlight but will be burned instead of buried, just in case.” 

Lucas regarded the man like an alien as they got started with their business. He’d alternated between prideful and unfeeling over the entirety for the short time that Lucas had known him, but this was a new low. The gnome had just killed someone and…

No, we killed someone, he corrected himself. I was standing there the whole time, and I didn’t exactly try to stop it. He had, actually. He’d told Heisenburgle not to do it, but he could certainly have done more. He would have done more if it had been someone he cared about. Just a junkie on death row? Well, he didn’t exactly get worked up about that sort of thing. The miserable bastard had died doing what he loved, and that was that. 

Lucas did stop going down into the basement to see the results after that, though. In the week that followed, they mixed another 87 varieties of Blue, but most of the time, it was anything but blue. In that time, he saw more black and gray potions than he could count, along with a number of greens and purples. There was even a red one that caught fire, and Lucas had to toss it outside in the snowy courtyard before it burst into flames. 

Some of the toxic mixtures had hilarious side effects. A few caused paranoia, and others caused excessive flatulence. Loss of taste was another common note to read on the pop-ups, along with temporary blindness; one even said it would cause hair loss. However, most of them just used words that were synonyms for dead. Poisonous. Toxic. Corrupted. Extremely hazardous. Maybe Hura’gh could survive one or two of those, but a human? Good fucking luck. 

The longer they tried it Heisenburgle’s way, the worse it got. In the end, only 6 of the potions were tested on live subjects. Two died, 2 were crippled, and two seemed to be fine. That was cold comfort for Lucas, and it was only when Heisenburgle had tried adding all of his favorite poisons to the mix that he finally said, “Okay, Mister Blue, you seem to think you know better. What should we do next?”

“I say we start with the easy stuff. Distillation. Concentration and a dash of perfectionism,” he said, noting that even if this was the first time that Heisenburgle was willing to listen, it was hardly the first time that Lucas had shared these ideas with the gnome. “We do enough of the easy shit, and maybe we won’t have to do any of the hard shit.”

Heiseburgle grumbled about that, but he didn’t argue too much, and together, the two of them started making small batches with slightly different ratios of the various ingredients and recording the results. Up until now, Lucas had always just mixed everything in equal parts. Usually, that resulted in something with a euphoria of 8 that could be boiled down to a 12. Now he was getting euphoria 9 Blue without trying, and after carefully adjusting the proportions with a number of experiments, they were able to get that to 10 without any additional ingredients.

That was done mostly by reducing the amount of goblin bile by half and increasing the witch grass blossoms by a similar proportion. It turned out it wasn't just poison he needed to get this reaction; it was very specific poison.

That was good news. Not good enough to get them where they wanted to go, of course, but good enough on its own to justify this little side quest he was stuck on. Assuming the Prince didn’t decide to off Lucas when he was done with him, they’d be able to dilute the product going forward by 20%, and no one would be the wiser. 

It wasn’t good enough to send him home, though. Even Heisenburgle knew that. So they started boiling things down to see what kinds of gains could be made that way. That caused its own problems, though. Normally, Lucas would just open a window, but here they were shooting for purities above what he would normally be looking for, so they had to stop after a certain point and build a primitive fume hood to allow the vapors to disperse outside. 

“I hadn’t considered such an arrangement before,” Heisenburgle said, admiring the finished product as he gave Lucas his first and only complement to date, “But this is excellent work. I will have it implemented in both of my other laboratories as well.”

“You’re welcome,” Lucas said with a smile. It was only fitting that he help the little gray-haired bastard in some way. After all, despite his unhelpful attitude, Heisenburgle had been a great help to Lucas whether he knew it or not. He’d managed to level up his strange system, he was learning a lot about alchemy both theoretically and practically, and he was going to make a whole lot more money doing the same thing as he always did when he finally went back home. 

Eventually, after several weeks of tedious work, they finally pushed the refinements as far as they could go. At this point, the Blue was so pure that it scintillated with little flecks of light long after the aqua-colored swirls had faded into the royal blue background of the potion. Somehow, he doubted this was good enough, though. Heisenburgle didn’t seem to think so either. 

Brew of Mana Intoxication (pure, concentrated) (10 doses): Euphoria 15, poison 2, mana regeneration decreased by 250% for 1 hour. 

“This will be enough to show the Prince we’ve made progress, at least,” the gnome grumbled as he eyed the small flask of fluid skeptically. “Maybe it will be enough to get in Skylara’s good graces again.”

Lucas tried and failed to remember where he’d heard that name, so instead, he said, “It's better. That shit is twice the strength of anything she got from me before now.”

“Oh? Twice? How would you quantify that exactly?” Heisenburgle asked, looking at Lucas curiously. “The color? The smell? What makes you think that…”

“It's the clarity,” Lucas lied smoothly. The real answer was that she’d probably gotten a taste of euphoria 8 stuff that he sold to the nobles, and this was 15, which made it pretty close to double, but he couldn’t say that. Instead, he answered. “I think that the clearer and the cleaner we get the ratios, the more transparent it becomes.”

“To what end?” Heisenburgle asked. 

“Dunno,” Lucas answered with a shrug. “We’ll find out when we get to the end of the road.”

The next few days, they worked on other things. Heisenburgle returned to his work on capturing starlight on moonless nights, and after a few botched attempts, he accepted Lucas’s advice about the need for more mirrors and lenses. “You’re getting close, man,” Lucas explained. “You just need like… more light in one spot, you know? Surface area. And then you have to cover it up before sunrise or moonrise or whatever else.” 

“All good ideas,” the gnome agreed. 

Beyond that, Lucas didn’t spend much time with him. Instead, he studied in the lower lab, making different potions that he had “learned” according to the little blue boxes that kept popping up from time to time. 

These were not the way he would have made a potion to get the same effects, of course. All of them had a bit too much poison for his tastes, but there were definitely some novel effects that he’d never seen before. Potion of Satiation. Lesser Potion of Armor. Potion of Greater Regeneration. Right now, he didn’t care what he was making, though, as long as he was making it perfectly according to the recipe. He had a feeling like that was going to lead somewhere. 

Sadly, when he made his first Potion of Greater Sleeplessness, nothing happened. Nothing should happen of course. Until now, he had no reason to believe that anything should happen, but what he’d learned so far was that it was possible that something could happen, even if he didn’t know what. 

So, he kept going. He followed the instructions to the letter, even when they were dumb, and made another half a dozen potions. Elixir or Water Breathing. Potion of greater claws. Glitter dust. 

Somewhere along the way, he found a book on makeup, and while he didn’t make any of that just now, he set it aside so he could learn what actually went into lipstick and rouge later. For now, he was focused on something more important. He could feel it. 

Lucas spent the next few days making potion after potion, certain that he was getting somewhere. Nothing happened for a long time, though, until suddenly it did. He had just finished making a potion of night sight when he felt a tingle pass through him. After that, the messages came in quick succession. 

Congratulations! You have made your 10th perfect lesser potion! Bonus experience has been awarded! 

Congratulations: You have achieved Alchemist Level 1! You can examine your character sheet to see what advantages that confers you!

“Bonus experience? What is this, a video game? What in the world do I need a character sheet for?” Lucas asked, confused. His confusion didn’t last for very long, though. Suddenly, just like that, as he said those words, a larger blue box popped up with all sorts of information. 

Name: Lucas Sharpe Class: Alchemist  Level: 1

Strength: 11 Agility: 13 Appearance…

Lucas was still in the midst of understanding these new interface options when he heard a knock on the door to the lab. That disrupted his concentration, sending the whole thing top to the floor in twinkles of light before he could really take it all in. Instead, he sighed loudly. 

“Come in,” Lucas yelled. Heisenburgle waddled in after that with a long look on his face. Something was definitely up. 

“What’s wrong, man?” Lucas asked with a smirk. “Break another mirror? You know that’s seven years of bad luck.”

When Heisenburgle didn’t snap back and instead stared at Lucas with tight lips, he continued, “Ohh, I get it. The Prince got back to us. The shit’s no good, right? He wants us to boost it more?”

“No, it’s much worse than that,” he said, looking pale. “Skylara, she wants to meet you.”

A chill went through Lucas then. A dragon wanted to meet him. This is not what he’d signed up for.